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TOP 3 Twitter Tips for Beginners + BONUS

Before we dive into the twitter tips you must know a little about the platform itself. Twitter is the king of (micro-blogging) Social Media platform, and ‘tweeting’, means creating your short message in 140 characters or less and share it with the rest of the world, especially your target audience. In order to reach out to your target customers, you need to first make them part of your network called the followers.

According to Alexa, it’s positioned as 14th most visited websites on the planet, and to be more specific when it comes to social networking, it’s number #3, right after the popular Russian Social Networking site VK.

Source: Alexa

If you never used twitter and are considering to join or have recently started using it, but not sure where to start? Then you are in the right place, here I am sharing just 3 tips for you to get started, and also check out the bonus tip towards the end.

Let’s dive right into the 3 Twitter Tips that will help you jumpstart.

Twitter Tip #1: Brand your Profile like a Pro.

Here are the 3 most important things that you need to focus on your twitter profile.

1. Update your profile pic or company logo.

Recommended dimensions are 400×400 pixels.

This is the first thing users will get their glance on, no matter where they are on twitter.

Get the best picture of yours, or logo of your company.

Don’t use fake pictures, keep it real.

Avatars can be acceptable depending on your brand, but real pictures are always preferable.

Good Examples of Profile Pics.

@scmoatti

@robertoblake

@danmartell

Bad Examples of Profile Pics

No eggs, please. This is default picture, replace it with something better.

Too dark, the person is not visible.

This is not your bedroom wall to put some fancy art piece unless there is a very good reason.

2. Tell about yourself or your company in few words.

Here are few things that you must fill in to get the best result out of your twitter profile.

Name: This is a must. Display your First and Last Name.

Bio: Explain who are you and what you do, in maximum 160 characters. Use some hashtags

Location: Enter your City/Sate. This will help filter when people in your area are looking to connect or find something that you might have to offer.

Website: Use either your blog, portfolio link or company website.

Good Examples of Bio

@scmoatti

@danolsen

@robertoblake

Bad Examples of Bio

Don’t want to offend anyone so hiding their Name and ID.

Too many twitter handles of various profile instead of profile description.

No Description

Too many icons, hashtags and twitter handle. Just too much going on here.

3. The Header photo is the Bill Board of your Twitter Profile.

Recommended dimensions are 1500×500 pixels.

Only when some mouse over or click on your profile they can see the Header.

It’s definitely the prime real-estate on your twitter profile when someone lands on your profile page so you want to use it wisely.

If you are an author you should showcase your book or if you are a speaker you should put your best snapshot speaking to your audience.

Good Examples of Header Photo

@sacca

@danmartell

@danolsen

Bad Examples of Header Photos

–

Yes, this is actually from my profile and I have to admit this is not the perfect header image to use.

The easiest and fasted way to manually start following is by using twitter mobile app. I have only tried iOS app, but as far as I know the Android app should be very similar. There are some mobile and desktop app that allows mass following but that’s an advanced topic and will be discussed in another post later, if you are interested you can google “twitter mass follow”, but I don’t recommend this practice as twitter might block your account.

Step 1: Click search icon.

Step 2: Enter a keyword, you may use # in front of the keyword as well.

Step 3: Click filter icon.

Step 4: Select People.

Step 5: Click the button next to a user profile to start following. Do this as much as you can until twitter stops you from doing it. For more info on the limitation go to the following link.

Twitter Tip #3: No Spamming

Don’t use any tools to respond to people who just followed you with an automated message saying Thank You, or asking them to like your Facebook page or follow you on SnapChat. It’s an old tactic and I gotta tell you that I hate it and this madness needs to stop.

This is an example of my twitter inbox filled with 90% of automated thank you messages that I will never open and read.

Bonus Tip #4: Real Action to Get Attention. (Includes 3 parts)

Thank you so much for tweeting to unlock this bonus tip. So here’s the real 3 parts secret for getting attention from users so they would love to follow you back or get to do more things for you. Of course start by following them as mentioned in Tip# 2 above.

Part 1. Like their recent Tweet, preferably pick a tweet that has few likes or may be none for more attention.

This is how you will like a tweet and I am in the pic. I pointed it out with a blue circle, the guy you see in a hat, that’s me. This is from Dan Olsen’s Meetup called the Lean Product Meetup @leanprodmeetup in Bay Area.

Part 2. Retweet their recent Tweet, preferably pick a tweet that has few Re-tweet or may be none for more attention.

To retweet simply click the retweet button shown in the image above.

Part 3. Find an industry influencer or a leader, read a post they tweeted and genuinely reply to their tweet thanking them by pointing out anything specific that you found interesting. Here is an example: I was very grateful to get a response from Brandon Sobotka, who is an industry leader and contributes to top news sites such as Huffington Post and Entrepreneur.com.

In conclusion, you must need to be active by start following, tweeting stuff that you like or just retweet. Here’s an extra bonus tip, you can easily auto-schedule your tweets for the entire month using tools like Klout for free. I will cover this in more details in my next twitter tips post, but you need to convince me by leaving a comment below that this post has helped you and you would like to hear more from me. Also, don’t forget to share this on your social media.

I currently have just over 2000 genuine followers, and the number is growing.